A farming family has been honoured with a street named after them in east Richmond.
“Zylmans Way” is the main road through the Richmond Industrial Centre where Montrose Properties is building large industrial warehouse buildings.
While the road was officially named by the City of Richmond as “Zylmans Way” in 2017, Montrose Properties held a formal event to honour the Zylmans family in early May.
It was the 10th anniversary of Montrose Properties, and they “felt it was the right time to formally honour the Zylmans family and their legacy in our community,” explained Montrose CEO Ken Low.
“We are grateful to honour the Zylmans family in Richmond and to celebrate and acknowledge their pioneering activities and community involvement,” Low said.
Wim and Annie Zylmans immigrated to Canada from the Netherlands in 1948.
In the mid-1950s, they bought nine acres of land in Richmond where they grew vegetables and strawberries.
They continued to buy property, eventually owning 500 acres, and established W&A Farms, one of the first market stands to sell directly to consumers.
Their son Bill Zylmans continued farming, running one of the city’s first pumpkin patches, practising regenerative farming and advocating for the agricultural sector.
The road, Zylmans Way, is on land that was mined for peat and then used as a construction waste landfill, Bill Zylmans explained.
“Montrose has brought what was non-usable land back into a kind of production, through the industrial warehouses, which provide a very beneficial use to the city – as well as continuing to operate a construction waste landfill on a different area of their property.”
Currently, four of 12 planned buildings are constructed at the Richmond Industrial Centre and are occupied by Wayfair, Coca-Cola and Canadian Tire.
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